Budget Jones on…

No, I’m not talking about the antibacterial hand gel battle against the dreaded autumn stomach bugs, I’ll bring that one up some other time.

This is a battle against one of the most detested, yet feared, (amongst parents at least) creatures to grace this planet. The summer holidays are generally time to relax ones guard, since these evil entities tend to multiply and spread like wildfire once September rolls around.

I am referring to the humble head-louse, or as my daughter used to call them, wood-lices, sweetly asking if she could keep some as pets to see how big they would grow. She was a little stumped when I asked her what, or indeed who, she planned to feed them on.

So there I was, a while back, minding my own business, quietly contemplating whether to eat the last Twirl, when I noticed that my youngest child was scratching like a monkey, which in itself is nothing too unusual. However this scratching was becoming increasingly frantic and frequent by the minute, so I called him over and absent-mindedly rifled through his hair, still thinking about chocolate. Shock! Horror! It became apparent that there were things living in there, which shouldn’t have been in there, let alone living.

There followed a rummage through the cupboards to eventually find an old, but just within its sell-by-date, bottle of the foul smelling magical liquid. You see, the ‘nits’, or dirty, stinking parasites to you and me, had been my aggressor in times past, cunningly resistant to pretty much every treatment available. But this was all I had to hand and the chemist was closed, so in the spirit of prudence, I made do.

Happily, they finally succumbed to my fierce determination and weapon of steel (comb). In fact, my kids had grown so weary of me scraping their heads raw at every opportunity that they developed stealth tactics like those American kids in the 1950s; ‘Duck and Cover’. Although I can’t see how hiding under a table would protect you from nits, let alone Hydrogen bombs.

Does anyone have any idea why a couple of years back when visiting the pharmacy to procure ‘special shampoo’, one had to produce a sample of the little devils sandwiched between two pieces of sticky tape, in exchange for some lotion courtesy of the NHS. (The option to discreetly purchase a large bottle for ten quid was always there, but being Budget Jones on student loans at that time…

I……didn’t.)

What was that all about then?

I have come to the conclusion that it has to be either;

A: The government are collecting head-louse DNA, and drawing up secret plans to cross-breed them with humans; so as to make the army more resilient to any possible future chemical warfare attacks. (It’s debatable whether H-bombs would even eliminate the little fuckers!)

Or;

B: The government simply want to carry out experiments on aforementioned critters, to try and establish HOW and WHY they are tougher than Jean-Claude Van Damme on caffeine pills, becoming more and more resilient to the vast array of treatments on the market.

It surely couldn’t be to prevent people who don’t actually have head-lice from getting a freebie bottle or two, I mean, what exactly would you use the stuff for if you didn’t have bugs the size of baby rats crawling around your head?

Stripping paint possibly?

As a precaution, I also doused oneself with the stuff and scraped away at my scalp for hours, primarily because I couldn’t sleep knowing that they might be ‘in there’. The consequence of this, of course was that I had to face my colleagues the following day with a fuzzy barnet, still stinking of Eau de Nit-Lotion…